New! Beginning in September 2002, I will be sharing a free
e-Zine, "Cybernetics in the Third Millenium" (C3M), about 1,000 - 18,000 words
per issue and about one isssue every other month. If you are interested in a free
subscription to this electronic newsletter, please email
abs@well.com
with C3M in the subject.

Note:

Albert Ward of Plovdiv, Bulgaria, has graciously done the work to translate this
document into Bulgarian.

INTRODUCTION

What This Is

This is a list, with reviews, of suggested books, periodicals, television shows and
computer programs for a classroom curriculum or individual study in cybernetics and
systems theory. It does not (yet) include a course plan, glossary, or extended
bibliography. I was asked to write this by some teachers who received a copy of class
notes I prepared for a course in "Understanding Whole Systems" sixteen years ago at
the University of California at Santa Cruz. They asked how I would revise it based on
what I know today. This document answers that question.

Cybernetics and Systems Theory Defined

Right off, let's dispense with the childish belief that words "have" meanings.
Charles Dodson / Lewis Carroll was close to the mark with this dialogue between Alice
and Humpty Dumpty:

Humpty Dumpty: [Having just proved it is 364 times better to celebrate

your un-birthday] There's glory for you!

Alice: I don't know what you mean by 'glory.'
Humpty Dumpty: Of course you don't -- 'till I tell you. I meant

'there's a nice knock-down argument for you!'

Alice: But 'glory' doesn't mean 'a nice knock-down argument.'
Humpty Dumpty: When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to

mean -- neither more nor less.

Alice: The question is whether you can make words mean so many

different things.

Humpty Dumpty: The question is which is to be the master -- that's all.

A lot of time has been wasted arguing over what the terms cybernetics and systems
theory "really" mean. Rather than add to the muddle, let me just define them, and
some other related concepts, the way I mean them and leave it at that.

Information is "a difference that makes a difference," to use Gregory Bateson's
definition. It is a measure of the reduction of uncertainty (entropy) that results
from receiving a message. The term was rigorously defined by Claude Shannon of Bell
Labs in 1950. Its unit is the bit, which is the amount by which your uncertainty is
decreased when you find out that something happened which had a probablity one half.
The bit measures in units of the minus the log to the base two of probablity: -log2(p)
By this definiton news that of event which had a probablity of one fourth yields two
bits of information, news that of event which had a probablity of one eighth yields
three bits of information, and so on.

System is a word that we use to describe any "experience-cluster" that we can map
as a set of interacting elements over time. Typically a system is mapped by
identifying the pathways of information flow -- as well as possibly the flow of
energy, matter and other variables. But the "flow" of information is special, because
only information can go from A to B while also staying at A. (Consider that photocopy
machines would be useless if you didn't get to keep your original.)

Cybernetics is the study of systems which can be mapped using loops (or more
complicated looping structures) in the network defining the flow of information.
Systems of automatic control will of necessity use at least one loop of information
flow providing feedback. (Appropriately the word cybernetics is derived from the
Greek for "pilot," as in "auto pilot" and "pilot light.") The word was first coined
in 1945 by Nobert Wiener in the book Cybernetics (listed below), in which he defined
it as "the study of control and communication in the animal and the machine." Gregory
Bateson clarifies the methodology in "Cybernetic Explanation" (one of the essays in
the book Steps to an Ecology of Mind, listed below.) In a nutshell, he says:

Causal explanation is usually positive. We say that billiard ball B moved
in such and such a direction because billiard ball A hit it at such and such an
angle. In contrast to this, cybernetic explanation is always negative. We
consider what alternate possibilites could conceivably have occurred and and
then ask why many of the alternatives were not followed, so that the particular
event was one of the few which could, in fact occur...

In cybernetic language, the course of events is said to be subject to
restraints, and it is assumed that, apart from such restraints, the pathways of
change would be governed only by equal probability.

Systems theory is the study of systems which can be mapped using any kind of
network to define the flow of information. This includes the study of systems
whose emergent properties we cannot yet predict due to a lack of plausable mechanisms,
rigorous mapping techniques and/or robust mathematical treatment.
By these definitions systems theory includes and is more abstract than cybernetics.
In General System Theory (listed below), Ludwig Bertalanffy draws this distinction:

Cybernetics is a theory of control systems based on communication (transfer of
information) between systems and environment and within the system, and control
(feedback) of the system's function in regard to environment... The model is of
wide application but should not be identified with "systems theory" in general.

... Cybernetic systems are a special case, however important, of systems
showing self-regulation.

Whatever distinctions you draw, what I am aiming at is the study of properties that
emerge from the interconnectedness and complexity of relationships between parts.

Why We Need Cybernetics and Systems Theory Now

"When we try to pick up anything by itself
we find it is attached to everything in the universe."
-- John Muir

I keep having this image of a survey course in human physiology, in which the syllabus
covers each body system in turn, and in the final week it is all put together into a
whole person. But, as the semester drags on the instructor gets behind in the
material, until suddenly it is time for finals and the integrative material has not
been covered. "Well," says the teacher, "I will leave it to the more ambitious
students as an extra credit project."

I see this as a metaphor for what is wrong with our educational system, and the body
of knowledge on which it is based: we have great methods for taking things apart and
analyzing them, but the problem of putting them back together is trivialized even
though it is unsolved. If Western Civilization's science, religion, philosophy and
epistemology were in better shape (more mature?), we would not need cybernetics and
systems theory as separate areas of inquiry; they would be woven into the fabric of
our knowledge as already are other prior mental tools such as: the flexibility of
language, the rigor of linear algebra, and the etiquette of professional
communication. But instead our tradition of education has a blind spot when it comes
to complexity, interconnectedness and relationship, and properties that emerge from
them.

This might all seem like abstraction of abstraction, some kind of "airy fairy"
diversion of language, except that the results are vital to questions of survival. As
columnist Ellen Goodman pointed out about health research (LA Times 5/26/87): "There's
a tendency to study single diseases and small body parts instead of lives. The group
concerned with the maintenance of lungs doesn't always 'do' ankles and the cancer-
prevention team isn't 'into' cardiovascular diseases. As the last generalists, we,
the owners of whole bodies, are supposed to think of ourselves as nothing more than
the sum of parts and potential diseases to be taken care of with separate regimens."
[Emphasis mine.] Or, as a Buddhist baker once said, "We're all in this alone." We
each face the integration of life, the universe and everything with few really useful
clues from our mainstream culture and educational systems.

The blind spot in our civilization when it comes to wholeness and loops goes back a
long way. Plato said, in Georgics, that "Helmsmanship is unassuming and modest and
does not boast and does not behave as if it had done something wonderful." This
contempt for piloting fits in with the general ancient Greek aversion to any linking
truth-seeking with useful activity. This meant the literate philosophers and the
skilled workers were kept apart. The Romans were by contrast ruthlessly practical,
had literate engineers (who could write down their skills and plans). They conquered
the known world with their "practicality," which had toxic social, religious and
ecological side effects. Christinanity swept the Roman empire partially as an
antidote to the Roman toxic pragmatism. The dark ages were, in Europe, a period of
avoidance of practical applications of technology in favor of the search for religious
grace. Our civilization didn't deviate from this pattern until the 13th Century, when
literate monks were forced to garden, and dragged out a bunch of Roman engineering
books, rediscovering hydraulics and inventing the windmill. Similar integrations of
learning and labor helped bring about the Renaissance and the Industrial Revolution.
And yet today we call schools where more practical skills are taught "Junior
Colleges," while all the really useless ideas are confined to "Universities." Greek
logic was made symbolic by nineteenth century academic George Boole, who -- like the
Greeks -- prohibited loops in logic chains. But in this century electronic engineers
found that you can build logic gates physically, and you can hook them up in loops,
resulting in both digital memories and digital oscillators. These humble engineers
were "off the map" of Western civilization's mathematics and philosophy. One of the
simplest of these circuits was a one-bit memory, which was named a "flip flop" --
indicating the lack of academic tradition for the whole idea.

Our traditions cling to the idea that explanations can be built of short causal
chains: event A causes event B, which causes event C. Loops are prohibited because
they are hard to analyze, introducing non-linear terms into the equations. Therefore
our current scientific method has become a form of pretend madness in which we deny
that anything is connected to anything else unless we can prove that it is. We use
this method because we can so much more easily start with assumed isolation and then
prove the connectedness of the components of a system than do the opposite. But our
simplifying assumption has become an article of faith, and this false faith is
aggravating the "externalities" of our society: pollution, crime, alienation,
illiteracy, the decay of our infrastructure, the decline of our industry. All of
these problems have been amplified by the success of our technology in achieving
narrowly defined goals. Cybernetics and systems theory are part of the antidote to
the toxic byproducts of our short-sighted reductionism.

Where Cybernetics and Systems Theory Came From

"What is a man, that he may know a number,
or a number, that a man may know it?"
-- Warren McCulloch

In 1868 James Clerk Maxwell (author Maxwell's equations of the electrodynamics, and
inventor of the mental construct Maxwell's Demon) was invited by steam engineers to
help them figure out why the governors on their engines didn't always work right:
sometimes the steam engines exploded. Maxwell analyzed the "steam-engine-with-
governor under a changing load" as a system of non-linear differential equations, and
concluded the system would do one of five things based on the coefficients of the
equations. (1) It corrected the speed back to the desired level fairly smoothly (the
most desired response):
Or (2) it corrected the speed back to the desired level after some overshoot (also a
desired response):
Or (3) it oscillated continuously — an annoying and inefficient repsonse later called
"hunting" in the 1930's by electronics researches (actually this behavior was not
explicitly described by Maxwell, probably because it is unstable, but it is implicit
in his analysis):
Or (4) it oscillated with increasing amplitude until it blew up (also sometimes called
"hunting":
Or (5) it just blew up:
This was the first explicitly cybernetic analysis of a system I can find. Thanks to
it the engineers were able to design their governors so that the steam engines didn't
explode so often. The governor became a metaphor for some 19th century visionaries:
Samuel Butler in Erewhon predicted thinking machines evolving out of governors, and
Alfred Russell Wallace came up with the idea of evolution by natural selection --
independently from Darwin -- when he realized that adaptive restraints operated like a
governor on a steam engine.

By the 1930's, when electronics was still young, electrical network theory had
developed, and the select few who studied it began to understand self-correcting
systems. Doctors also tended to gain this intuition, and in 1932 physician Walter
Cannon in The Wisdom of the Body coined the term homeostasis to describe this
phenomenon.

By the late 1940's, thanks mostly to the growth of electronics, a lot of people were
running around with the idea that "feedback" was somehow important. One of them was
Warren McCulloch, a pioneer brain researcher who first proposed the mathematical
modeling of neurons. He was approached by the Macy Foundation to chair a conference
on the nervous system. The Macy Foundation, funded by the family that ran Macy's
department store (and its famous Thanksgiving Day parade), funded conferences on
medicine; they had done the heart, lungs, skin, etc. but never the brain or nerves.
But McCulloch was determined to make these meetings more than a typical medical
conference. He invited physiologists, electronics specialists, mathematicians,
physicists, even social scientists -- including husband and wife anthropologists
Gregory Bateson and Margaret Mead. The participants met for a few days every six
months over a period of several years. At first McCulloch only let the "neuro" people
talk; he wanted everyone to understand the great questions facing them before they
started looking for answers. But eventually a cautious collaboration developed, as
the participants probed their intuition of what was missing from their knowledge of
minds.

In 1948 one of the attendees, mathemetician Norbert Wiener, published a book in which
he purported to name the new field of inquiry they were investigating: Cybernetics was
the name of the field and the book. This move received mixed reviews from the other
participants in the conference. However, many of the attendees did return to their
disciplines and begin using the new set of tools provided by the conference, and by
Wiener (including two who I had the good fortune to meet and study under: Gregory
Bateson and Heinz von Foerster).

Meanwhile, in Germany, Ludwig von Bertalanffy began publishing papers on the theory of
general systems, in which he (prophetically in many cases) laid down some of the
criteria of such a theory. He pointed out that the fundamental tool of general
systems theory was the system of differential equations, but any such set of equations
robust enough to describe non-trivial systems was unsolvable. Therefore, intuition
and computer simulation should play important roles in a theory of complex systems.
But his work had little impact initially.

In 1950 Shannon and Weaver at Bell Labs published their first paper on what has been
called "information theory" and "communication theory," but I would prefer to call
"transmission theory." It is the study of how to get bits reliably over an unreliable
channel -- a topic of great interest to Bell Telephone at that time. In academia this
work eclipsed cybernetics, probably because it was less intellectually threatening;
cybernetics advocated connecting outputs to inputs, which had been forbidden since the
ancient Greeks, while information theory dealt with the familar model of:

Also, it didn't help that the popular press picked up and began to abuse the word
"cybernetics," as if it meant "the study of computers, robots, and electronic gizmos,"
or that the book Psycho-Cybernetics was published by plastic surgeon Maxwell Maltz in
1960; it was a useful pop-psychology self-help book about auto-suggestion, but had
little to do with cybernetics.

With the advance of digital computers in the 50's and 60's, the field of "information
science" was heralded, which included the study of computer languages and their
compilers, as well as Shannon's work. But cybernetics mostly suffered benign neglect
by information science departments. By way of an example, in 1966 Scientific American
published an entire issue devoted to the new technology of information, and later re-
issued it as one of their theme paperbacks, called Information. Every diagram in this
book has the same structure as the one above: INPUT, PROCESS, OUTPUT.

Yet, while the so-called information scientists ignored cybernetics (which they could
because they designed systems and were free to design them without feedback), those
scientists investigating the biochemistry of cell metabolism, the principles of
nervous systems, and the population biology of ecologies (all pre-existing systems)
were drawn to cybernetics because it offered more accurate models of the systems they
were studying.

Some progress was made by topologists in the late 60's in classifying systems in terms
of all possible behaviors they could exhibit. Initially this work, called the theory
of dynamical systems, simply refined the distinctions drawn by Maxwell's governor
paper.

The biggest methodological barrier to the advance of cybernetics in the 50's and 60's
was the expense of computer time. But in the 70's pocket calculators became
affordable, and it was on such a calculator that some of the earliest examples of
chaos were discovered. This term is not used here in the every-day sense, but to
describe a fifth category of system behavior besides the four illustrated above: non-
periodic deterministic behavior. The discoveries of chaos, along with increasingly
available computer power, sparked a renaissance of interest in cybernetics and systems
theory in the late 80's.

Won't it be exciting to see what the 90's will bring?

How I Got Into Cybernetics and Systems Theory

"Watch out -- you might get what you're after."
-- David Byrne, 1983
"Burning Down the House"

In the fall of 1969, while a Junior in high school in southern California, I got my
hands on an early Whole Earth Catalog. I was attracted to it because the title
sounded integrative, and sure enough the first section was entitled Understanding
Whole Systems. Here I was exposed to the ideas of Bucky Fuller, Norbert Wiener,
Marshall McLuhan, and Paul Ehrlich. I went to a college where I could design my own
major program (University of California at Santa Cruz, Kresge Collge), and searched
for three years for a faculty member who would sponsor my major in "Understanding
Whole Systems." Dr. Gregory Bateson arrived at Kresge in the fall of 1973, and I had
even studied his English accent for a school play, but it wasn't until he was featured
on the first page of the Understanding Whole Systems section of the new Whole Earth
Epilog in summer of 1974 that I realized he was who I had been looking for. Starting
in my senior year I took all of his classes, and he sponsored a student-directed
seminar which I taught in early 1975 on Understanding Whole Systems. I'd planned to
extend this activity into my major program, but I too quickly reached the end of my
senior year, I hadn't met the university breadth requirements to graduate, and I was
out of scholarship money.

Also in my senior year I met Dixie. We dropped out of school and bicycled across
America together in 1976-77. On this journey I discovered that poverty was a real
danger in an unplanned life -- a lesson that had escaped me both while growing up in
suburbia and while attending a Liberal Arts university -- so upon our return from
this trip I earned money and got a new scholarship so I could go back to school. I
proposed marriage to Dixie, and I switched my major to Information Sciences in hopes
of being more employable. Sure enough, after six months of school in 1977, at the
dawn of the Personal Computer revolution I got my first job in computers, even though
I had not studied Info Sci long enough to get a degree. We wed and moved from
northern California to Massachusetts.

For a decade I rode the computer wave, letting my interest in whole systems be a hobby
on my back burner. About the only thing I did to keep this interest alive to was to
occasionally visit libraries on the Dewey Decimal System and scan the shelf that
started with 000. This is where all the books on cybernetics, systems theory, theory
of knowledge, philosophy of science, library science, management science, ESP, flying
saucers, witchcraft and Atlantis may be found.

By 1987 I was a computer graphics programmer for the NASA Space Station project at
Rockwell International in southern California, which was exciting work until Rockwell
lost the Space Station contract. In casting about for a new challenge I fell into
working for a company (currently named Stardent Computer Inc.) which manufactures
Graphics Supercomputers. Now it so happens that the users of these kind of computers
are people who need extremely high-speed computation combined with interactive
graphics, and most people who fit that description are doing scientific research using
a new methodogy called numerical simulation. And this methodology is on the
forefront of systems theory. So I find that I am reaping the dual bonus that my hobby
is useful in my job, and my job gives me opportunities to expand my understanding of
my hobby.

As I explained above, some teachers recently received, through a mutual friend, a copy
of my class handouts from that course in "Understanding Whole Systems" which Bateson
sponsored me in teaching sixteen years ago at the University of California at Santa Cruz (UCSC). They asked how I would revise
those notes based on what I have learned in the intervening years. I am happy to
answer that question.

FORMAT

"I throw a spear into the dark -- that is intuition.
Then I have to send an expedition into the jungle
to find the way of the spear -- that is logic."
-- Ingmar Bergman

Stewart Brand was running around in the mid-sixties (when NASA had taken its
first satellite photos of the earth with the entire round profile in the frame
but wouldn't release them to the public), handing out protest buttons which
said, "WHY HAVEN'T WE SEEN THE WHOLE EARTH?" And sure enough, when detailed
color pictures taken by the Apollo Eight crew of our home planet were published
right after Christmas 1968, they galvanized the public and helped in the
popularization of the ecology movement. As Joni Mitchell sang:

"In a highway service station, over the month of June,
Was a photograph of the Earth taken coming back from the Moon.
And you couldn't see a city on that marble bowling ball,
Or a forest or a highway, or me the least of all."

It was this type of romanticization of the Whole Earth which lead me to the
Whole Earth Catalog. Actually, the WEC (as it calls itself) began as a mail-
order catalog for back-to-the-land communes, but it had an eccelctic, holistic
view that quickly took it into cybernetcis and systems theory, and I followed.
As I explained in the introduction, these "catalogs" edited by Stewart Brand
first introduced me to most of the ideas and thinkers listed in this essay.

QUOTE:

The WHOLE EARTH CATALOG got started in a plane over Nebraska in March 1968. I
was returning to California from my father's long dying and funeral that
morning in Illinois. The sun had set ahead of the plane while I read Spaceship
Earth by Barbara Ward. Between chapters I gazed out the window into dark
nothing and slid into a reverie about my friends who were starting their own
civilization hither and yon in the sticks and how could I help. The L. L. Bean
catalog of outdoor stuff came to mind and I pondered upon Mr. Bean's service to
humanity over the years. So many of the problems I could identify came down to
a matter of access. Where to buy a windmill. Where to get good information
about bee-keeping. Where to lay hands on a computer without forfeiting
freedom...

Shortly I was fantasizing access service. A Truck Store, maybe, travelling
around with information and samples of what was worth getting and information
where to get it. A Catalog too, continuously updated, in part by the users. A
Catalog that owed nothing to the suppliers and everything to the users. It
would be something I could put some years into.

Amid the fever I was in by this time, I remembered Fuller's admonition that you
have about 10 minutes to act on an idea before it recedes back into dreamland.
I started writing on the end papers of Barbara Ward's book (never did finish
reading it).

* * * * * *

Understanding whole systems is knowing how to fly. You can rise above local
circumstances, travel with blurring speed, and set down in a place wholly
distant, strange and wonderful. Or maybe not so wonderful, in which case you
best know how to take off in a tight situation, and remember where home is.

The price you pay for understanding is the grim knowledge of trade-offs in
design. That you can have an airplane that goes fast or one that lands in 200
ft., but not both. That to save these people you may have to starve those
people.

By and by you dwell in a wilderness of conflicting considerations. If you
survive your wishful solutions -- and there's usually margin -- you may become
a wily and sky-hooked metaphysician. The solutions are always meta. The means
always funky field expedient.

* * * * * *

Evolution and cybernetics are going to come together. This is the edge of
knowledge right now, and it's right at the heart of education, and the schools
don't know it.

In getting my mind ready to study systems of all types, I find it useful to
zoom through the universe looking at all size scales. This is an old idea; as
Jonathan Swift penned:

So, Nat'ralists observe, a Flea
Hath smaller Fleas that on them prey,
And these have smaller Fleas to bite 'em,
And so proceed ad infinitum.

There are several books and films that take this kind of Cosmic Zoom through
the universe; this book (along with its namesake film) is my favorite.

QUOTE:

Powers of Ten is a phrase you will hear soon enough in almost any scientific
conversation. It is also the short title of a brief and beautiful film
produced by the Office of Charles and Ray Eames. We came to know the Eameses
and their studio through taking part in the filmmaking...

This book is a transformation of the film, as the film was itself a
transformation of an earlier little book, Cosmic View: The Universe in Forty Jumps,
by a Dutch school teacher. Kees Boeke's innovative book for children was our
introduction to this ingenious itinerary, and we treasured it for years.

Two pieces in one book: The first, "Both Sides of the Necessary Paradox," an
interview with Bateson that probes well into the man's ideas about
metacommunication and his metacommunication about ideas. This is the
article that got me motivated enough to read Steps to an Ecology of Mind.

The second piece is "Fanatic Life and Symbolic Death Among the Computer Bums," a
look at the "outlaw" origins of interactive computer (video) games, written
at a moment in history when we didn't all know they were coming. The failure
of "information science" to predict the important changes in computing comes
from the lack of cybernetic awareness which leads to drawing a box around the
computer excluding the human. Only with the programmer/operator "in the loop"
do the magical effects of computers appear.

QUOTE:

My father, the geneticist William Bateson, used to read us passages of the
Bible at breakfast -- lest we grow up to be empty-headed athiests.

If Spinoza was right when he said in De Emendatione that "the greatest good is
the knowledge of the union which the mind has with the whole of nature," then
this is a great book indeed.

Thinking he had a year to live (incorrectly as it turned out) Bateson condensed
all the non-trivial things he knew into a book for laypersons. The bottom
line: minds in organisms and ecologies are simularly organized, using
digital internal reshuffling followed by analog natural selection involving
an interface to an environment to achieve "mental" effects.

QUOTE:

In June 1977, I thought I had the beginnings of two books. One I called
The Evolutionary Idea and the other Every Schoolboy Knows*. The first was to
be an attempt to reexamine the theories of biological evolution in the light of
cybernetics and information theory. But as I began to write that book, I found
it difficult to write with a real audience in mind who, I could hope, would
understand the formal and therefore simple presuppositions of what I was
saying. It became monstrously evident that the schooling in this country [USA]
and in England and, I suppose, in the entire Occident was so careful to avoid
all crucial issues that I would have to write a second book to explain what
seemed to me elementary ideas relevant to evolution and to almost any other
biological or social thinking -- to daily life and to the eating of breakfast.
Official education was telling people almost nothing of the nature of all those
things on the seashores and in the redwood forests, in the deserts and the
plains. Even grown-up persons with children of their own cannot give a
reasonable account of concepts such as entropy, sacrament, syntax, number,
quantity, pattern, linear relation, name, class, relevance, energy, redundancy,
force, probability, parts, whole, information, tautology, homolgy, mass (either
Newtonian or Christian), explanation, rule of dimensions, logical type,
metaphor, topology, and so on. What are butterflies? What are starfish? What
are beauty and ugliness?

It seemed to me that the writing out of some of these very elementary ideas
could be entitled, with a little irony, "Every Schoolboy Knows."

But as I sat in Lindisfarne working on these two manuscripts, sometimes adding
a piece to one and sometimes a piece to the other, the two gradually came
together, and the product of that coming together is what I think is called a
Platonic view. It seemed to me that in "Schoolboy," I was laying down very
elementary ideas about epistemology, about how we can know anything. In the
pronoun we I of course included the starfish and the redwood forest, the
segmenting egg, and the Senate of the United States.

And in the anything which these creatures variously know, I included "how to
grow into five-way symmetry," "how to survive a forest fire," "how to grow and
still stay the same shape," "how to learn," "how to write a constitution," "how
to to invent and drive a car," "how to count to seven," and so on. Marvelous
creatures with almost miraculous knowledges and skills.

Above all I included "how to evolve," because it seemed to me that both
evolution and learning must fit the same formal regularities or so-called laws.
I was, you see, starting to use the ideas of "Schoolboy" to reflect, not on our
own knowing, but on the wider knowing which is the glue holding together the
starfishes and sea anemones and redwood forests and human committees.

My two manuscripts were becoming a single book because there is a single
knowing which characterizes evolution as well as aggregates of humans, even
though committees and nations may seem stupid to two-legged geniuses like you
and me.

I was transcending that line which is sometimes supposed to enclose the human
being. In other words, mind became, for me, a reflection of large parts and
many parts of the natural world outside the thinker.

(* A favorite phrase of Lord Macaulay's. He is credited with "Every schoolboy
knows who imprisoned Montezuma, and who strangled Atahaulpa.")

A collection of a life's work of interdisciplinary thinking that grew more
cybernetic over the years. On the first page of the "Understanding Whole
Systems" section of the Whole Earth Epilog in 1974, Stewart Brand had this to
say about this book:

Where the insights of Buckminster Fuller initiated the Whole Earth
Catalog [in 1968], Gregory Bateson's insights lurk behind most of what's
going on in this Epilog.

Through him I became convinced that much more of whole systems could be
understood than I thought -- that mysticism, mood, ignorance and paradox
could be rigorous, for instance, and that the most potent tool for
grasping these essences -- these influnece nets -- is cybernetics.

Bateson is responsible for a number of formal discoveries, most notably
the "Double Bind" theory of schizophrenia. As an anthropologist he did
pioneer work in New Guinea and (with Margaret Mead) in Bali. He
participated in the Macy Foundation meetings that founded the science of
cybernetics but kept a healthy distance from computers. He has wandered
thornily in and out of various disciplines -- biology, ethnology,
linguistics, epistemology, psychotherapy -- and left each of them
altered with his passage.

This book chronicles the journey. It is a collection of all his major
papers, 1935 - 1971. In recommending the book I've learned to suggest
that it be read backwards. Read the recent broad analyses of mind and
ecology at the end of the book and then work back to see where the
premises come from.

In my view Bateson's special contribution to cybernetics is in exploring
its second, more difficult realm (where the first is feedback, a process
influencing itself, which Bateson calls 'circuit'; and the second is the
meta-realm of hierarchic levels, the domain of context, of paradox and
abundant pathology, and of learning.)

Strong medicine.

To give the above advice more detail, I recommend that you read the sections in
this order, and be sure to read the connecting text after each section:

They say that power corrupts; but this, I suspect, is nonsense. What is true is
that the idea of power corrupts.

* * * * * *

In no system which shows mental characteristics can any part have unilateral
control over the whole. In other words, the mental characteristics of the
system are immanent, not in some part, but in the system as a whole.

* * * * * *

The social scene is nowadays characterized by the existence of a large number
of self-maximizing entities which, in law, have something like the status of
'persons' -- trusts, companies, political parties, unions, commercial and
financial agencies, nations, and the like. In biological fact, these entities
are precisely not persons and are not even aggregates of whole persons. They
are aggregates of parts of persons.

* * * * * *

When your cat is trying to tell you to give her food, how does she do it? She
has no word for food or milk. What she does is to make movements and sounds
that are characteristically those that a kitten makes to a mother cat. If we
were to translate the cat's message into words, it would not be correct to say
that she is crying 'Milk!' Rather, she is saying something ike 'Mama!' Or,
perhaps still more correctly, we should say that she is asserting 'Dependency!
Dependency!' The cat talks in terms of patterns and contingencies of
relationship, and from this talk it is up to you to take a deductive step,
guessing that it is milk that the cat wants.

[-- "Problems in Cetacean and Other Mammalian Communication," 1966]

* * * * * *

Evolution has long been badly taught. In particular, students -- and even
professional biologists -- acquire theories of evolution without any deep
understanding of what problem these theories attempt to solve. They
learn but little of the evolution of evolutionary theory.

[-- "On Emptyheadedness Among Biologists and State Boards of Education," 1970,
not in the paperback edition]

RIGOR: ****_ INTUITION: *****

Cybernetics

"I think that cybernetics is the biggest bite
out of the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge
that mankind has taken in the last 2000 years.
But most such bites out of the apple have
proven to be rather indigestible --
usually for cybernetic reasons"
-- Gregory Bateson, 1966
"From Versailles to Cybernetics,"
in Steps To an Ecology of Mind

I wish Ashby had written more. This and the above book are all we got from
this great, precise thinker.

QUOTE:

The development of life on earth must thus not be seen as something remarkable.
On the contrary, it was inevitable. It was inevitable in the sense that if a
system as large as the surface of the earth, basically polystable, is kept
gently simmering dynamically for five thousand million years, then nothing
short of a miracle could keep the system away from those states in which the
variables are aggregated into intensely self-preserving forms.

The limit of algorithms is mapped clearly, with a firm mathematical
introduction to computability and what the mind cannot do if it is merely a
computer.

QUOTE:

This book forms an introduction to the common ground of brains, machines, and
mathematics, where mathematics is used to exploit analogies between the working
of brains and the control-computation-communication aspects of machines. It is
designed for a reader who has heard of currently fashionable topics such as
cybernetics, information theory, and Godel's theorem and wants to gain from one
source more of an understanding of them than is afforded by popularizations.
Here the reader will find not only what certain results are, but also why. The
number of pages has been kept deliberately small [about 160] so that a first
reading is feasable in an evening or two. Yet a lot of ground is covered, and
the reader who wants to go further should find himself reasonably well prepared
to tackle the technical literature. Full use of the book does require a
moderate mathematical background -- a year of college calculus (or the
equivalent "mathematical maturity"). However, much of the book should be
intelligible to the reader who chooses to skip the mathematical proofs, and no
previous study of biology or computers is required at all. [p. vii]

Heinz Von Foerster was a co-founder of cybernetics, and he retired near where I
went to college, so I got to meet him a few times (his wife made great
strudel), but what I really got a lot out of was sitting in Bateson's office
thumbing through this book Heinz put together as a year long class project
('73-'74) at the Biological Computer Lab at the University of Illinois at
Urbana, taking notes longhand becasue the book wasn't loaned out. Included are
definitons of key concepts by Ross Ashby, Gregory Bateson, Stafford Beer,
Stewart Brand, Jurgen Habermas, Garrett Hardin, Ivan Illich, John Lilly,
Humberto Maturana, Warren McCulloch, Gordon Pask, Bill Powers, G. Spencer-
Brown, Francisco Valera, Heinz Von Foerster and Norbert Wiener. A new edition
was brought out by the Cybernetic Systems Program at SJSU in '86.

QUOTE:

TOOL

Something with a use on one end and a grasp on the other end.
[--Stewart Brand]

FEEDBACK

The return of part of a system's output to change its input. Positive feedback
increases the input, negative feedback decreases it. Hence if feedback is used
(as it is in all regulatory systems) in comparing output with some standard to
be approached, negative feedback is inherently stabilizing (because it
decreases the error) while positive feedback is inherently de-stabilizing (and
the error gains explosively in magnitude). The casual use of 'feedback' to
mean 'response to a stimulus' is incorrect.

* * * * * *

An unpoetic inexpressive word that shrieks for replacement. Correct use of the
word would refer to eating your own vomit. 'Positive'or 'negative' feedback
would signify whether you like the vomit or not. I'd prefer a term like
'circuit' to indicate any system or subsystem that responds to its own action
-- and something like 'convergent' or 'divergent' to indicate the nature of
response ('divergent' would cover the two unstable forms -- anti-corrective
'positive feedback' and over-corrective hunting oscillation.)

entropy, secrecy is counterproductive, robots are never bored but
people are creative

NOTES:

Okay, since Wiener coined the word you might want to read something he wrote.

QUOTE:

There are those who are skeptical as to the precise identity between entropy
and biological disorganization. It will be necessary for me to evaluate these
criticisms sooner ot later, but for the present I must assume that the
differences lie, not in the fundamental nature of these quantities, but in the
systems in which they are observed. It is too much to expect a final,
clear-cut definition of entropy on which all writers will agree in any less
than the closed, isolated system. [p. 21]

RIGOR: **___ INTUITION: **___

Cybernetics - 2nd Edition Wiener, Norbert 1948,61
or control and communication in the animal and the machine
MIT Press, Cambridge, MA

IDEAS:

cybernetics, function prediction

NOTES:

The problem here is that Wiener was a mathematical prodigy and he had no
patience for people who couldn't instantly follow his symbology. This means
that you aren't warned what the prerequisites are for this book, and there
isn't enough context for his equations. Still, this was the seminal book on
cybernetics, so I have to mention it. Wiener's emphasis was on function
prediction and statistics; this was his background, and he had designed
self-aiming anti-aircraft guns in World War II, which predicted an aircraft's
future path based on its previous positions.

QUOTE:

When I came to M.I.T. around 1920, the general mode of putting the questions
concerning non-linear apparatus was to look for a direct extension of the
notion of impedance which would cover linear as well as non-linear systems.
The result was that the study of non-linear electrical engineering was getting
into a state comparable with that of the last stages of the Ptolemaic system of
astronomy, in which epicycle was piled on epicycle, correction upon correction,
until a vast patchwork structure ultimately broke down under its own weight.
[p. viii, preface to 1961 edition]

RIGOR: ***__ INTUITION: *____

Systems Theory

"The division of the perceived universe
into parts and wholes is convenient
and may be necessary, but no necessity determines
how it shall be done."
-- Gregory Bateson, 1979
Mind and Nature: A Necessary UnityAn Introduction to General Systems Thinking Weinberg, Gerald M. 1975, 2001
Dorset House Publishing
353 W. 12th St.
New York, NY 10014
www.dorsethouse.com

IDEAS:

system, state, tool, mapping

NOTES:

This is the best single book in this list for classroom or individual use to
specifically learn introductory general systems theory.

QUOTE:

Paradoxically, one way to master the power of a tool is to probe its
weaknesses. Thus we offer the Count-to-Three Principle:

IF YOU CANNOT THINK OF THREE WAYS OF ABUSING A TOOL, YOU DO NOT
UNDERSTAND HOW TO USE IT.

Faithful adherence to this principle would protect us from the enthusiasm of
the optimizers, maximizers and other species of perfectionists.

A strong case is made for the theoretically correct approach of using systems
of interacting differential equations to describe natural and artificial
systems, and then this approach is rejected for lack of rigorous solutions.

QUOTE:

Major functions [of the Society for General Systems Research] are to: (1)
investigate the isomorphy of concepts, laws and models in various fields, and
to help in useful transfers from one field to another; (2) encourage the
development of adequate theoretical models in the fields which lack them; (3)
minimize the duplication of theoretical effort in different fields; (4) promote
the unity of science through improving communication among specialists.

[When I joined the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton] I did this in the
hope that by rubbing elbows with those great atomic physicists and
mathematicians I would learn something about living matters. But as soon as I
revealed that in any living system there are more than two electrons, the
physicists would not speak to me. With all their computers they could not say
what the third electron might do. The remarkable thing is that it knows
exactly what to do. So that little electron knows something that all the wise
men of Princeton don't, and this can only be something very simple.

The traditional wisdom was that all systems do nothing, oscillate or blow up.
Then the paradigm ripped, and the word "chaos" was borrowed from its
everyday meaning to describe systems of non-linear differential equations which
do none of the above: never stopping, never repeating. This excellent social
history ties together the math, the philosophy and the real-world applications
(turbulent fluids, unstable ecologies, heart fibrillations) of chaos theory.

QUOTE:

Big whorls have little whorls
Which feed on their velocity,
And little whorls have lesser whorls
And so on to viscosity.

[-- Lewis F. Richardson]

I know that most men, including those at ease with problems of the greatest
complexity, can seldom accept even the simplest and most obvious truth if it be
such as would oblige them to admit the falsity of conclusions which they have
delighted in explaining to colleagues, which they have proudly taught to
others, and which they have woven, thread by thread, into the fabric of their
lives.

A topological approach "all possible systems" is here introduced intuitively
using diagrams, and with all the symbolic math in an appendix. This book set
came out of the chaos group at UC Santa Cruz that formed the year after I left.

QUOTE:

The strategies for making mathematical models for observed phenomena
have been evolving since ancient times. An organism -- physical,
biological, or social -- is observed in different states. This
observed system is the target of the modeling activity.
Its states cannot really be described by only a few observable
parameters, but we pretend that they can. This is the first step
in the process of "mathematical idealization" and leads to a
geometric model for the set of all idealized states: the state space
of the model. Different models may begin with different state spaces.
The relationship between the actual states of the real organism and the
points on the geometric model is a fiction maintained for the sake of
discussion, theory, thought, and so on: this is known as the
conventional interpretation

An island chain off of the intellectual continent, "Bucky" Fuller's theories of
systems are here explained cogently, and with connections back to the
mainland of consensus science, for the first time. Appropriately, the author
was Fuller's personal assistant for many years. She waited until he died to
write this, so with impunity she can also tell us when Fuller doesn't make
sense.

QUOTE:

The term "pattern integrity" is a product of Fuller's lifelong commitment to
vocabulary suitable for describing Scenario Universe.

When we speak of pattern integrities, we refer to generalized patterns
of conceptuality gleaned sensorially from a plurality of special-case
pattern experiences... . In a comprehensive view of nature, the
physical world is seen as a patterning of patternings... . (505.01-4)
[Synergetics]

Let's start with his own simplest illustration. Tie a knot in a piece of nylon
rope. An "overhand knot," as the simplest possible knot, is a good starting
point. Hold both ends of the rope and make a loop... [etc.] The procedure
applies a set of instructions to a piece of material, and a pattern thereby
becomes visible.

What if we had applied the same instructions to a segment of manila roap
instead? Or a shoelace? Or even a piece of cooked spaghetti? We would still
create an overhand knot... The knot isn't that little bundle that we can see
and touch, it's a weightless design, made visible by the rope.

A holographic stream-of-consciousness blend of the true history of the
struggle to control technology combined with a prescription for individual
action to make the world work. Stewart Brand had this to say about Bucky
on the first page of the "Understanding Whole Systems" section of the Last Whole
Earth Catalog:

The insights of Buckminister Fuller initiated this catalog. ... People
who beef about Fuller mainly complain about his repetition -- the same
ideas again and again, it's embarassing, also illuminating, because the
same notions take on different contexts. Fuller's lectures have a raga
quality of rich nonlinear endless improvisations full of convergent
surprises.

Some are put off by his language, which makes demands on your head like
suddenly dicovering an extra engine in your car -- if you don't let it
drive you faster, it'll drag you. Fuller won't wait. He spent two
years silent after illusory language got him in trouble, and he returned
to human communication with a redesigned instrument.

Fuller said that as a result of his Navy experiences, he would rather be not
understood than misuderstood. Plenty of both do occur, unfortunately, and the
irony is that so many of the Bucky groupies I met at World Game events and such
completely misunderstood his ideas. Be warned. Yet the best way to access his
ideas is not through his writings, but through audio and videotapes of his
talks. There he made his expression of his ideas the simplest.

QUOTE:

Ninety-nine per cent of humanity does not know that we have the option to "make
it" economically on this planet and in the Universe. We do. It can only be
accomplished, however, through a design science initiative and technological
revolution.

For three-quarters of all the trillions of nights that humans have been on
board planet Earth, the Moon has been their most intimate sky companion. For
millions of years humans assumed it to be obvious that no one would really
touch the Moon. Those who did not assume that to be obvious were obviously
loony -- lunatics, "Moon touchers."

In the battle for human power systems to see who is to control the world's
people and their economies, the communist U.S.S.R. and the capitalist U.S.A.
had been taught by World War II that whoever could fly the highest would gain
the observational advantage for controlling the firepower of their guns and
thus win the military supremacy of the world. In the "cold" Third World War
the U.S.S.R. and U.S.A., inspired by the German rocketry, saw that whoever
could maintain the most around-the-world-outer-space-platforms could control
around-the-world-firepower. The Moon was just such a "permanent" sky
advantage.

Greatly challenged by the Russian's initially most successful space-operating
accomplishments, President John Kennedy authorized the funds for the Apollo
Project, which had first to do all of the tasks here on Earth preparatory to
getting a team of humans ferried over to the Moon, to land, and then to return
safely to Earth.

There were obvious first things first to be accomplished -- second things
before third things and 7308 things before 7309 things. Some were going to
take longer than others. There would be a pattern of start-ups and lead-ins of
differing time lengths. This complex, shad-bone-like pattern would be known as
"the critical path." The critical path of overall human history's
technological evolution involved [approximately] two million things that had to
be done before blast-off of the first Earth-to-Moon ferrying-over-and-back....

Now, in 1980, a large number of humans ten years of age and under, all of whom
were born after humans reached the Moon, have learned so much about the Apollo
Project as to be quite familiar with its critical path accomplishment. They
have entered the evolutionary scenario at a spontaneous conceptual level twice
as well informed as initially as were any pre-Apollo Project humans.... The
under-ten-year-old post-Moon-landers are saying, "Humans can do anything they
need to do." They are writing me letters saying so and asking why we don't
make our world work satisfactorily for all humans. This is encouraging.

By 1989 those successful Moon-ferry-over conditioned, thoughtful young ones
will be twenty. That's just the right age for commanding and executing the
1989 world-embracing design science revolution, which will result in the
conversion of humanity into an integrated, omniharmonious, economically
successful, one-world family.

A useful definiton of invention is given, linking the concrete physical
manifestations that make an invention work with the abstract linguistic
constructs that make it possible to communicate and reproduce inventions.
Consise and clear mental tools for the study of artefacts.

QUOTE:

Think of the design process as involving first the generation of alternatives
and then the testing of these alternatives against a whole array of
requirements and restraints.

* * * * * *

...all mathematical derivation can be viewed as change in representation,
making evident what was previously true but obscure. This view can be extended
to all of problem solving -- solving a problem simply means representing it so
as to make the solution transparent. If the problem solving could actually be
organized in these terms, the issue of representation would indeed become
central.

RIGOR: ***__ INTUITION: ****_

Psychology

"Man need not be degraded to a machine
by being denied to be a ghost in a machine."
-- Gilbert Ryle

(See also Bateson's essays in section III
of Steps to an Ecology of Mind above.)

Someone once asked Werner Erhardt, of "The est Training" fame, how people get
into behavior traps. He said, "You don't find them; they find you." This
answer shows an awareness of elementray memetics, the theory of self-replicating messages. Before the word was coined, Dr. Eric Berne was using an
awareness of its principles to analyize behavior traps, using the methods of
Transactional Analysis, which he founded. (He first described it in the book
Games People Play, and others went on to promote it in I'm OK, You're OK.).

Do be aware: Grinder and Bandler (below) say that the Parent-Adult-Child (PAC)
parts of the mind described by Berne are not really there until the patient is
taught Transactional Analysis; they form just another "script," albeit one with
useful handles for the therapist to grab onto.

QUOTE:

Life-script scenes have to be set up and motivated ahead of time, just like
theatrical scenes. A simple example is running out of gas. It is nearly
always set up two or three days in advance by looking at the gauge, "planning"
to get gas "some time soon," and then not doing it. In fact it is impossible
to run out of gas "right now" except in a strange car with a broken gauge.
Many winners go through a whole lifetime without running dry.

Life scripts are based on parental programming, which the child seeks out for
three reasons. (1) It gives a purpose to life where it might otherwise be
wanting. A child does most things for the sake of people, usually his parents.
(2) It gives him an acceptable way to structure time (acceptable, that is, to
his parents). (3) People have to be told how to do things. Learning for
oneself may be inspiring, but it is not very practical. A man does not become
a good pilot by wrecking a few airplanes and learning from his errors. He has
to learn through other people's failures, not his own.... So parents program
their children by passing on to them what they have learned, or what they think
they have learned. If they are losers, they will pass on their loser's
programming, and if they are winners, they will pass on that kind of program.
The long term always has a story line.

A linguist and a computer programmer analyzed the work of several incredibly
effective hypnotherapists who could cure life-long neuroses in a few minutes,
and converted their (mostly unconscious) techniques into a rigorous set of
instructions for behavior change: Neuro-Linguistsic Programming (NLP).
I studied briefly under these guys at UCSC, where they managed to anger Bateson
royally, and though I coudn't bear them in person either (because of their
endless arrogance and amorality) I do get a lot of value from their books --
perhaps for the same reason I got a lot out of The Prince by Machiavelli.

QUOTE:

There are several important ways in which what we do differs radically from
others who do workshops on communication or psychotherapy. When we first
started in the field, we would watch brilliant people do interesting things and
then afterwards they would tell various particular metaphors that they called
theorizing. They would tell stories about millions of holes, or about
plumbing: that you have to understand that people are just a circle with pipes
coming from every direction, and all you need is Drano or something like that.
Most of these metaphors weren't very useful in helping people learn
specifically what to do or how to do it....

There's also a group of people who are called theoreticians. They will tell
you what their beliefs are about the true nature of humans and what the
completely "transparent, adjusted, genuine, authentic," etc. person should be,
but they don't show you how to do anything.

Most knowledge in the field of psychology is organized in ways that mix
together what we call "modeling" -- what traditionally has been called
"theorizing" -- and what we consider theology. The descriptions of what people
do have been mixed together with descriptions of what really "is." When you
mix experience together with theories and wrap them all up in a package, that's
a psychotheology. What has developed in psychology is different religious
belief systems with very powerful evangelists working from all of these
differing orientations.

Another strange thing about psychology is that there's a whole body of people
called "researchers" who will not associate with the people who are practicing.
Somehow the field of psychology got divided up so that the researchers no
longer provide information for, and respond to, the practitioners in the field.
In medicine, the people doing research are trying to find things to help the
practitioners in the field. And the practitioners respond to the researchers,
telling them what they need to know more about.

RIGOR: *____ INTUITION: *****

Biology

"The hen is an egg's way of making another egg".
-- Samuel Butler

(See also Bateson's essays in section IV
of Steps to an Ecology of Mind above.)

Bateson said the disease of Western civilization was piety, and the cure was
more natural history. Hang out with frog ponds and moth-filled meadows,
mental patients and people from other cultures. Stewart Brand started out in
his pre-Catalog days as a budding biologist, and insisted it molded his whole
systems thinking. So given that it is useful to think biologically, this book
(and the sequels) can help you get there. News flash: the real natural world
is messy!

QUOTE:

Item. I have been trying to think of the earth as a kind of organism, but it
is no go. I cannot think of it this way. It is too big, too complex, with too
many working parts lacking visible connections. The other night, driving
through a hilly, wooded part of southern New England, I wondered about this.
If not like an organism, what is it like, what is it most like? Then,
satisfactorily for that moment, it came to me: it is most like a single
cell. [p. 4]

* * * * * *

Item. A good case can be made for our nonexistence as entities. We are not
made up, as we had always supposed, of successively enriched packets of our own
parts. We are shared, rented, occupied. At the interior of our cells, driving
them, providing the oxidative energy that sends us out for the improvement of
each shining day, are the mitochondria, and in a strict sense they are not
ours. They turn out to be little seperate creatures, the colonial posterity of
migrant prokaryocytes, probably primitve bacteria that swam into ancestral
precursors and stayed there. Ever since, they have maintained themselves and
their ways, replicating in their own fashion, with their own DNA and RNA
different from ours. [p. 2]

A very smart eclectic physicist speculates with great insight into the origins
of life, among other things.

QUOTE:

So far as modern science is concerned, we have to abandon completely the idea
that by going into the realm of the small we shall reach the ultimate
foundations of the universe. I believe we can abandon this idea without any
regret. The universe is infinite in all directions, not only above us in the
large but also below us in the small. If we start from our human scale of
existence and explore the content of the universe further and further, we
finally arrive, both in the large and in the small, at misty distances where
first our senses and then even our concepts fail us.

[-- Emil Wiechert, 1896]

* * * * * *

Technology without morality is barbarous; morality without technology is
impotent.

* * * * * *

Let us summarize the story up to this point. Our illustrious predecessor Erwin
Schrodinger gave his book the title What Is Life? but neglected to ask whether
the two functions of life, metabolism and replication, are separable or
inseparable. Our illustrious predecessor John von Neumann raised the question
which Schrodinger had missed and gave it a provisional answer. Von Neumann
observed that metabolism and replication, however intricately they may be
linked in the biological world as it now exists, are logically separable. It
is logically possible to postulate organisms composed of pure hardware, capable
of metabolism but incapable of replication. It is possible to postulate
organisms composed of pure software, capable of replication but incapable of
metabolism. And if the functions of life are separated in this fashion, it is
to be expected that the latter type of organism will become an obligitory
parasite upon the former.

Wake up! Watch out! The nanites (as they are called on Star Trek: The Next
Generation) are coming, and you'd better be ready for them! Smaller-than-
micro-miniature self-reproducing robots (that can mutate!) could be the plague
or terror weapon of the nineties and beyond, and could also be the panacea that
achieves universal prosperity and life extension. No kidding!

This book also has excellent introductions to memetics and hypertext.

QUOTE:

On December 29, 1959, Richard Feynman (now a Nobel laureate) gave a talk at an
annual meeting of the American Physical Society entitled "There's Always Room
at the Bottom." He described a non-biochemical approach to nanomachinery
(working down, step by step, using larger machines to build smaller machines),
and stated that the principles of physics "do not speak against the possibility
of maneuvering things atom by atom. It is not an attempt to violate any laws;
it is something, in principle, which can be done; but in practice, it has not
been done because we are too big.... Ultimately, we can do chemical
synthesis... put the atoms down where the chemist says, and so you make the
substance." In brief, he sketched another, nonbiochemical path to the
assembler. He also stated, even then, that it is "a development which I think
cannot be avoided."

RIGOR: ***__ INTUITION: ****_

The Selfish Gene Dawkins, Richard 1976
Oxford University Press, New York and Oxford

IDEAS:

gene, meme

NOTES:

This book has a lot going for it. Dawkins provides a good rigorous basis for
sociobiology, demonstrating a useful set of mental tools for thinking about
teleology without anthropomorphism. This is worth the price of admission
alone. He also sheds light on the generation gap and the battle of the sexes
using these tools. (He explains why, as Bertrand Russell once said on Laughing
Gas: "hogamus higamus, man is polygamous, higamus hogamus, woman's
monogomous.") And then he goes on to do the most useful thing of all: he coins
the term meme, as an informational analog to gene, and explains it thoroughly.
The new science of memetics explains why, as Horace said nine hundred years
ago: "Words challenge eternity." And how Samuel Butler, who died long before I
was born, could make this promise to me (and to you):

Yet meet we shall, and part, and meet again,
Where dead men meet, on lips of living men.

QUOTE:

The essential concept Maynard Smith introduces is that of the evolutionarily
stable strategy.... A 'strategy' is a pre-programmed behavioral policy. An
example of a strategy is: 'Attack oppontent; if he flees pursue him; if he
retaliates run away.' It is important to realize that we are not thinking of
the strategy as being consciously worked out by the individual. Remember that
we are picturing the animal as as a robot survival machine with a pre-
programmed computer controlling the muscles. To write a strategy out as a set
of simple instructions in English is just a convenient way for us to think
about it. By some unspecified mechanism, the animal behaves as if he were
following these instructions.

An evolutionarily stable strategy or ESS is defined as a strategy which, if
most members of the population adopt it, cannot be bettered by an alternative
strategy. It is a subtle and important idea. Another way of putting it is to
say that the best strategy for an individual depends on what the majority of
the population are doing. Since the rest of the population consists of
individuals, each one trying to maximize his own success, the only strategy
which persists will be one which, once evolved, cannot be bettered by any
deviant individual. Following a major environmental change there may be a
brief period of evolutionary instability, perhaps even oscillation in the
population. But once an ESS is achieved it will stay; selection will penalize
deviation from it.

RIGOR: ***__ INTUITION: *****

Nature and Man's Fate Hardin, Garrett 1959
New American Library, Inc.
1301 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY

IDEAS:

evolution

NOTES:

I almost didn't list this book because I'm still annoyed by Hardin's whole
"Lifeboat Ethics" thing, but then I remebered I used to be into the Population
Bomb/Limits to Growth doom-saying myself... I am listing it here because it's
a good introduction to some of the central problems of Darwin's theory of
evolution (including bravely facing some of the necessary paradoxes and sticky
ethical issues inherent in Darwin's ideas), and the theory of evolution was the
first in Western science to use cybernetic explanation in its arguments.
Hardin makes the theory even more explicitly cybernetic, especially with the
aid of some excellent diagrams.

QUOTE:

Those who take an interest in the transmission of ideas have often pointed out
how a concept may be first be developed in the "exact sciences" (physics,
chemistry) and then move out into the less exact (biology, psychology), perhaps
even reaching those dimly scientific regions called the social sciences. There
is a hierarchy of prestige among the sciences that makes it easy for us to see
examples of transmission in this direction. What has been less often noticed
is that ideas may just as well go the other way: in the idea of cybernetics we
have a clear-cut example. The principle of the survival of the fittest, said
John Maynard Keynes, is just a vast generalization of Ricardian economics. We
need now to see what this cryptic statement means, in order not only to
understand the origin of an important idea, but also to see the source of some
enduring conflicts in human thought.

An idea is always older than its name. The idea of cybernetics was used
implicitly by the French physiologist, Claude Bernard, in 1787. The Scottish
physicist, Clerk Maxwell, used it in 1868 in developing the theory of the
steam-engine governor. But long before both of them Adam Smith had just as
clearly used the idea in his Wealth of Nations (1776). The "invisible hand"
that regulates prices to a nicety is clearly this idea. In a free market, says
Smith in effect, prices are regulated by negative feedback. The line of
thought begun by Smith was carried through in greater detail in the early
1800's by the London stock speculator and brilliant amateur economist, David
Ricardo. Because his work is more thorough (and perhaps also because
"Smithian" is un-Englishic) the name "Ricardian economics" is often applied to
this system of thought.

RIGOR: ***__ INTUITION: ***__

Sociology

A rigorous theory of behaviors of interacting potential belligerents is
presented, using the graphical tools of phase diagrams of continuous state
spaces. This is the one book on this list which I haven't read all the way through,
but I was so impressed with the first few chapters that I recommend it anyway.

the medium is the message (the message in a medium itself drowns out any
"content" delivered through it)

the newest media are always invisible, except by side-effects

the content of a new medium is always an older displaced medium, which
becomes visible and "nostalgic" as a result of being "re-framed" in this way

your skill set for processing reality gets established during your childhood,
shaped by the media you learned through; therefore it becomes useful to call
those born in the 1910's "book babies," those born in the 1930's "radio
babies," those born in the 1950's "television babies," and those born in the
1970's "computer babies"

QUOTE:

[from the table of contents:]

9 The Written Word: An Eye for an Ear
10 Roads and Paper Routes
11 Numbers: Profile of the Crowd
14 Money: The Poor Man's Credit Card
18 The Printed Word: Architect of Nationalism
20 The Photograph: The Brothel-without-Walls
21 Press: Government by News Leak
25 Telegraph: The Social Hormone
26 The Typewriter: Into the Age of the Iron Whim
30 Radio: The Tribal Drum
32 Weapons: War of the Icons

* * * * * *

"The medium is the message" means, in terms of the electronic age, that a
totally new environment has been created. The "content" of this new
environment is the old mechanized environment of the industrial age. The new
environment reprocesses the old one as radically as TV is reprocessing the
film. For the "content" of TV is the movie. TV is environmental and
imperceptible, like all environments. We are aware only of the "content" or
the old environment. When machine production was new, it gradually created an
environment whose content was the old environment of agrarian life and the arts
and crafts. This older environment was elevated to an art form by the new
mechanical environment. The machine turned Nature into an art form. For the
first time men began to regard Nature as source of aesthetic and spiritual
values. They began to marvel that earlier ages had been so unaware of the
world of Nature as Art. Each new technology creates a new environment which is
itself regarded as corrupt and degrading. Yet the new one turns its
predecessor into an art form. When writing was new, Plato transformed the old
oral dialog into an art form. When printing was new the Middle Ages became an
art form. "The Elizabethan world view" was a view of the Middle Ages. And the
industrial age turned the Renaissance into an art form as seen in the work of
Jacob Burckhardt. Siegfried Giedion, in turn, has in the electric age taught
us to see the entire process of mechanization as an art process.

As Thomas Pynchon said in Gravity's Rainbow, "If they can get you asking the
wrong questions, they don't have to worry about the answers." That's the whole
point of the Judo-like statement "the medium is the message" -- it's designed
to shock you into realizing you were asking the wrong questions. But you can
get thoroughly "McLuhanized," pick up the lingo and talk "media speak" up a
storm, and still be asking the wrong questions. Since McLuhan wrote (lineal,
mechanized, pre-electronic) books, many of his "followers" stayed in a lineal
thinking trap -- even while contemplating a simutaneous global village -- and
many of the "hip" young people who could more easily grasp his ideas (the "TV
babies") were put off by his pages of type with no pictures. So, this book is
a sort of collage-book, graphically bold and innovative (for 1967), facilitated
by a guy named Jerome Agel -- who also did I Seem To Be a Verb with Bucky
Fuller, The Making of Kubrick's 2001, and other collage-books in the late 60's.

This is the best book on McLuhan's ideas to give an MTV baby, too.

QUOTE:

There is a world of difference between the modern home environment of
integrated electronic information and the classroom. Today's television child
is attuned to the up-to-the-minute "adult" news -- inflation, rioting, war,
taxes, crime, bathing beauties -- and is bewildered when he enters the
nineteenth-century environment that characterizes the educational establishment
where information is scarce but ordered and structured by fragmented,
classified patterns, subjects, and schedules. It is naturally an environment
much like any factory set-up with its inventories and assembly lines.

This is such an excellent book. An anthropologist in New Guinea and environs
writes on the effects of Western media technologies on the "natives," including
us. He speaks both from first-hand experience and an amazing set of accounts
by others.

QUOTE:

"Love thy label as thyself." -- Joyce

In Kandangan village the people became co-producers with us in making a film.
The initial proposal came from us, but the actual filming of an initiation
ceremony became largely their production.... The initiates were barely
conscious at the end of their ordeal, but they grinned happily when shown
Polaroid shots of their scarified backs. The elders asked to have the sound
track played back to them. They then asked that the film be brought back and
projected, promising to erect another sacred enclosure for the screening.

Finally they announced that this was to be the last involuntary initiation, and
they offered for sale their sacred water drums, the most sacred objects in this
ceremony. Film threatened to replace a ceremony hundreds, perhaps thousands,
of years old.

* * * * * *

[French Guinea prince] Modupe left Africa for the United States where he
studied anthropology, then worked for MGM as an actor and consultant. To avoid
offending African governments, MGM insisted that no film on Africa resemble
Africa. Moduope's task was purely creative: design buildings, songs, shields,
dances, masks, even "languages," all of which Americans would accept as
authentically African but which no African would recognize as his. Module was
so successful at this that he convinced even Africans and they modified their
art accordingly.

* * * * * *

To depict a whole object on a flat surface, literate man employs three-
dimensional perspective: he shows only that surface visible from a single
position at a single moment. In short, he fails.

In contrast, native artists of British Columbia represent a bear, say, in full
face and profile, from back, above and below, from within and without, all
simultaneously. By an extraordinary mixture of convention and realism, these
butcher-draftsmen skinned and boned and even removed the entrails, to to
construct a new being, on a flat surface, that retained every significant
element of the whole creature.

Brand's earnest metalogue about how media shapes us and we shape media in
the human communication environment, disguised as a tour of MIT's R&D
facilites for exploring new media.

QUOTE:

Information wants to be free.

It also wants to be expensive.

Information wants to be free because it has become so cheap to distribute, copy
and recombine -- too cheap to meter. It wants to be expensive because it can
be immeasurably valuable to the recipient. That tension will not go away. It
leads to endless wrenching debate about price, copyright, "intellectual
property," and the moral rightness of casual distribution, because each round
of new devices makes the tension worse, not better.

* * * * * *

"I'm for sloppy corrective programming," [Marvin] Minsky told students at a
Vivarium meeting. "When you've got a bug, don't fix it. Write another piece
of code to recognize that it's about to happen and head it off." He paused.
"The biological way of cleaning up code is very cowardly, and you all know what
that is: death. Hans Moravec at Carnegie-Mellon is working on how to cure
death -- trying to figure out how to merge code of immortals without including
the bugs. Immortality has this problem: if you live forever, then you get an
infinite number of bugs."

* * * * * *

"A couple of hundred years from now, maybe [science fiction writers] Isaac
Asimov and Fred Pohl will be considered the important philosophers of the
twentieth century, and the professional philosophers will almost all be
forgotten, because they're just shallow and wrong, and their ideas aren't very
powerful."

Slater is the only sociologist I've read who pays attention to the paradoxes
of the human web. Maybe that's because he studied under Bateson. His theory
of how a "messiah" changes a society is invaluable.

QUOTE:

To exercise control over the environment limits its freedom to influence us.
We act in such a way as to make its influence a product, in part, of our own
efforts -- that is, we help create the stimulus to which we respond. Control
means we put a bit of us in the environment and then treat it as if it were a
wholly independent stimulus.

Control thus dulls and deadens our experience. The more we control our
environment the less possible it is to experience novelty, however avidly we
seek it and seek to coerce it. For novelty and freshness cannot be coerced --
cannot be commissioned or scheduled, like a happening. They are dependent for
their very existence on our having no control over them. To pursue them is to
destroy them. [p. 10]

Harry Truman said "The only thing that's really news is the history you don't
know." This applies especially to the history of technology. Lynn White,
Jr. was the first scholar to look at technological change as a crucial driver
and indicator of social change. (White's research helped inspire James Burke
to produce the TV series Connections.)

Margalef presents a heuristsic theory of ecology, arrived at by Bertalanffy's
method of rejecting systems of differential equations as unsoluble and
then patiently rigorizing cybernetic "rules of thumb" gained intuitively by
examining lots of data -- in his case on algae. A very good condensation of
the book, with great new diagrams, appeared in the Summer 1975 issue of the
CoEvolution Quarterly (listed below under Whole Earth Review).

QUOTE:

A BASIC PRINCIPLE OF ORGANIZATION

Everywhere in nature we can draw arbitrary surfaces and arbitrarily declare
them boundaries separating two subsystems. More often than not it turns out
that such boundaries are asymmetric; they separate two subsystems that,
although arbitrarily limited, are different in their degrees of organization.
There is some energy exchange between the two sub-systems in the sense that the
less-organized subsystem gives energy to the more-organized subsystem, and, in
the process of exchange, some information in the less-organized is destroyed
and some information is gained by the already more-organized. Probably it is
useful from the point of view of general science (but distracting from the
point of view of ecology) to remember a few such couplings: gas/Maxwell demon,
electrical conductor/semiconductor, atmosphere/sea, environment/thermostat,
substrate/enzyme, enzyme/RNA, cytoplasm/nucleus, mesenchym/nervous system,
biotop/community, plants/animals, prey/predator, plankton/benthos, agrarian
communites/industrial societies.

Computer simulations predict that, as Werner Erhardt once said, "If we
don't change course, we will very likely end up where we're headed." In this
case we are headed for a massive die-off due to overpopulation, pollution, lack
of resources and/or economic depresion triggered by the above. This makes the
human agenda from here on out quite clear. Most of the people who attacked
these conclusions did so by attacking the methodology. The methodology is
correct, it just needs to be refined. (We went from having no rigorous model
of the world system to having a simple, inaccurate one.) And in fact, then
model has been refined, and more recent conclusions are less dire in the short
term. But all modelers agree we need more modeling.

QUOTE:

For a short time the situation is especially serious because population, with
the delays inherent in the age structure and the process of social adjustment,
keeps rising. Population finally decreases when the death rate is driven
upward by lack of food and health services.

RIGOR: ****_ INTUITION: ****_

Chemistry

In this book Maxwell's Demon at last is slain. The thermodynamics of
Boltzmann tells us that if you put a bunch of gas molecules in one side of a
chamber by temporarily using a barrier, when you remove the barrier the gas
will fill the chamber evenly, increasing the entropy of the system. The
dynamics of Newton tells us that if you then reverse the direction of each gas
molecule's motion, they will all end up on one side of the chamber again (if
only briefly), despite the apparent decrease in entropy which results.

This book explores this paradox between dynamics and thermodynamics, and
concludes that "reversing the directions of the molecules" imparts a tremendous
amount of negentropy (negative entropy, or information) to the system.
Similarly, a "stacked" deck of cards may appear random upon casual observation,
but when it is dealt to the right number of players and one of them has a Royal
Flush, it becomes obvious that the entropy of the stacked deck was much lower
(and therefore the information content much higher) than a random arrangement.

QUOTE:

To come back to our previous question, how can the world of processes and the
world of trajectories ever be linked together?

However, while it is easy to criticize the subjectivistic interpretation of
irreversibility and to point out its weaknesses, it is not so easy to go beyond
it and formulate an "objective" theory of irreversible processes. The history
of the subject has some dramatic overtones. Many people believe that it is the
recognition of the basic difficulties involved that may have lead to
Boltzmann's suicide in 1906.

RIGOR: ***__ INTUITION: ****_

Physics

Mr Tompkins in Paperback Gamow, George 1965
Press Syndicate of the University of Cambridge
32 E. 57th St., New York, NY 10022

IDEAS:

speed of light (c), Planck's constant (h), Maxwell's Demon

NOTES:

George Gamov, though a great physicist who helped build quantum theory and the
atom bomb, was a hilarious prankster and wrote very droll books. This book is
a reprint in paperback of Mr. Thomkins In Wonderland (1940) and Mr. Thompkins
Explores the Atom (1945), delightful stories in which the love-struck Mr.
Thompkins tries to impress his girlfriend's father, a physics professor, by
attending the old man's public lectures. But Mr. Thompkins is always lulled to
sleep by the lecture, and dreams incredible dreams in which twentieth-century
physics is made comprehensible to the layperson, mostly by altering the scale
of physical constants to see what would happen.

Quantum physics is a 51-year-old theory and still most scientists can't make it
fit common sense and so they reject the theory emotionally. Feynman accepts it
emotionally and understands enough to see some of its astounding consequences.
In this book he explains Quantum Electro-Dynamics (QED) without resorting to
extrapolating it from Newtonian approximations, thereby freeing the ideas from
their nineteenth-century baggage. QED describes the interaction of photons
(radiant energy) and electrons (the outer shell of matter), and so is the
theory of all the physics and chemistry we experience in normal life.

If you want to learn physics, with intuition and rigor being given equal
attention, there is no better source than the three-volume Feynman lectures.
They are edited transcripts of tape recordings of freshman lectures by Feynman
at Cal Tech, and therefore have a flowing, personable style that can sustain
the reader; plus it's excellent physics. Feynman never approximates or
simplifies without telling you that is what he is doing. Why study physics to
learn systems theory? Because the deterministic, reductionist dogma still
asserts that we will eventually break everything down to physics, and whether
that is true or not we will have to study physics to find out.

QUOTE:

...there is a physical problem that is common to many fields, that is very old,
and that has not been solved. It is not the problem of finding new fundamental
particles, but something left over from a long time ago -- over a hundred
years. Nobody in physics has been able to analyze it mathematically
satisfactorily in spite of its importance to the sister sciences. It is the
analysis of circulating or turbulent fluids. If we watch the evolution of a
star, there comes a point where we can deduce that it is going to start
convection, and thereafter we can no longer deduce what should happen. A few
million years later the star explodes, but we cannot figure out the reason. We
cannot analyze the weather. We do not know the patterns of motions there
should be inside the earth. The simplest form of the problem is to take a pipe
that is very long and push water through it at high speed. We ask: to push a
given amount of water through that pipe, how much pressure is needed? No one
can analyze it from first principles and the properties of water. If the water
flows very slowly, or if we use a thick goo like honey, then we can do it
nicely. You will find that in your textbook. What we really cannot do is deal
with actual, wet water running through a pipe. That is the central problem
which we ought to solve some day, and we have not.

A mystic pointed at the almost intelligent behaviors of fluids that physics
could not then explain, before physics hit upon chaos as a way to solve these
problems.

QUOTE:

Together earth, plant world and atmosphere form a single great organism, in
which water streams like living blood.

* * * * * *

Do the forms of the living organism merely betray the character of the watery
phase through which they have passed, or is it that the water itself,
impressionable as it is, is subject to living, formative forces and creative
ideas of which it is but the visible expression? If so water as such would be
the embodiment a higher world of forces penetrating through it to the material
world and using it to form the living organisms.

* * * * * *

The objection could be raised that all this happens quite automatically
according to the fixed rules of cause and effect. But in these processes cause
and effect so often change places. In many processes in the realm of the
liquid element the cause is in the same moment also effect and the effect at
the same moment cause, whereby they unite in manifold interplay to form a
moving totality. Just as in a living organism cause and effect intermingle in
a simultaneous correlation, so they do also in water.

Besides studying the principles of physics, it is useful to look what you can
do with this stuff -- or what we may be able to do sooner or later. Robert
Forward works for an R&D center of Hughes Aircraft located in Malibu, and likes
to look at problems whose physics are solved but whose engineering
implementations are about 50 years off.

Einstein's gravity theory allows many shapes for a time machine. In fact, it
seems that any rotating object that is dense enough to produce a region with a
twisted ultra-gravity field can produce time-confusing regions. There are some
shapes, however, that can produce time-travel regions that might be usable to
humans. One gravitational mass configuration that can act as a time machine is
a large, rapidly rotating, dense obect that is collapsing to a black hole just
as its spin speed is rising to that of light. This extreme version of a
spinning, collapsing star can be described quite accurately by a mathematically
rigorous solution to the full, nonlinear Einstein gravity equations. No
approximations are used. This solution is called the Kerr metric, after the
theorist Roy Kerr, who probably was dismayed when he found that the
mathematical beauty that he had discovered not only described something
physical, but something that might have some future application.

RIGOR: ***__ INTUITION: ****_

Information Science

In 1974 the inventor of hypertext (1) explained computers clearly so we can get
that out of the way, and (2) described his vision of the power of interactive
computers, a vision that has half come true since. (In 1987 he came out with a
revised version. I liked the original better, with its IBM slectric text
clumsily pasted together with woodcuts of the Tick-Tock Man of Oz.)

QUOTE:

Any nitwit can understand computers, and many do.

* * * * * *

If you enjoy juggling straight razors, then you'll enjoy working with today's
operating systems.

* * * * * *

On a sunny day, I give humanity a fifty-fifty chance of survival in the near
term. My friend Eric Gullichsen aksed if I knew anyone more pessimistic. I
named someone more pessimistic; a very great programmer and teacher, who thinks
humanity has less than twenty years, period. Eric's reply: "That's because he
uses VMS instead of UNIX."

The social history of the interactive computer revolution, from the first
interactive text editor using paper tape and oscilloscopes at MIT in the 50's
to graphical adventure games using color monitors and floppy disks from
software companies in the Sierra mountains in the 80's. Wizardry. Computers
are recursive and heuristic at their lowest levels,though these features
are usually hidden at higher levels of user interfaces, to avoid boogling the
minds of the masses. Those who operate at the lowest levels, hackers and
system programmers, learn powerful cybernetic lessons, which show up in their
social activites and outlooks.

In the movie War Games, the Kid, who cracked a NORAD computer and accidentally
started it counting down to World War III, was talking to the Old Professor,
who'd designed that NORAD computer, as they tried to stop armaggedon by
distracting the computer with a game of tic-tac-toe. "Can you get it to play
itself?" the Kid asked. The Old Professor replied, "Number of players: zero."

That is a hacker joke.

QUOTE:

It was an endless spiraling logical loop. As people used ITS, they might
admire this feature or that, but most likely they would think of ways to
improve it. This was only natural, because an important corollary of hackerism
states that no system or program is ever completed. You can always make it
better. Systems are organic, living creations; if people stop working on them
and improving them, they die.

* * * * * *

There's a lot of problems in the world that can really be solved by applying
two or three times the persistence that other people will.

A compelling vision of the future of interactive computers. Only through
metaphorical illusions can our minds handle the complexity and bandwidth of
data transfer with computers which the future will require of us. The Army
will study the fantasy gamers, to learn their interfacing technniques. This
vision was considered ridiculous for years, then suddenly it was obvious.

QUOTE:

In the once-upon-a-time days of the First Age of Magic, the prudent sorcerer
regarded his own true name as his most valued possesion but also the greatest
threat to his continued good health, for -- the stories go -- once an enemy,
even a weak unskilled enemy, learned the sorcerer's true name, then routine and
widely known spells could destroy or enslave even the most powerful. As time
passed, and we graduated to the Age of Reason and thence to the first and
second industrial revolutions, such notions were discredited. Now it seems
that the Wheel has turned full circle (even if there never really was a First
Age) and we are back to worrying about true names again:

The first hint that Mr. Slippery had that his own true name might be known --
and for that matter, known to the Great Enemy -- came with the appearance of
two black Lincolns humming up the long dirt driveway that stretched through the
dripping pine forest down to Road 29.

This history of calculating devices before true electronic programmable digital
computers is really a history of the idea of numerical simulation. It is
essentially a transcript of a museum exhibit comissioned by IBM, and executed
by the ubiquitous Offcie of Charles and Ray Eames in Chicago.

QUOTE:

The Dynamo and the Virgin

Historian Henry Adams came away from the 1900 Trocadero Exposition in Paris
with a new way of viewing the machine. He concluded that what the Church had
been to medieval culture, the dynamo was to ours -- an idea he expressed by
metaphorically juxtaposing "The Dynamo and the Virgin" in The Education of
Henry Adams. In it he wrote: "The new American, like the new European, was the
servant of the power house."

* * * * * *

Bjerknes' Weather Mechanics

With the advent of the telegraph came widespread simultaneous weather reports.
Forecasters drew weather charts, then made predictions by following the
movement of weather conditions across them.

But Norwegian physicist Vilhelm Bjerknes saw that accurate forecasting would
depend on mathematical techniques for describing atmospheric behavior. He
shifted the focus of weather prediction back to problems of mechanics and
physics.

However, the mathematical techniques Bjerknes sought did not appear until Lewis
Fry Richardson developed them during World War I. And the technology for
implementing them did not appear until the forties.

A student of Poincare and Heinrich Hertz, Vilhelm Bjerknes' early training was
in the field of hydrodynamics. His work on electronic resonance aided in the
development of the electromagnetic theory of radiation.

Weather Forecasting as a Problem in Mechanics and Physics, in which Bjerknes
suggested methods of predicting weather by translating weather data into
mathematical terms, was first published in [Meteorologische Zeitschrift, an]
Austrian meteorological journal in 1904.

* * * * * *

When the practicality of his work was challenged, Bjerknes replied: "It may
require many years to bore a tunnel through a mountain. Many a laborer may not
live to see the cut finished. Nevertheless this will not prevent later comers
from riding through the tunnel at express-train speed."

A Weather Forecast Factory

Nearly forty years before electronic computers, Lewis Fry Richardson imagined a
"forecasting factory" in which thousands of mathematicians raced the weather
around the globe. From this factory he developed the basis for a model for
numerical weather prediction. The model was fundamentally the same as that
used today by computers.

"After so much hard reasoning, may one play with a fantasy? Imagine a large
hall like a theater.... The walls of this chamber are painted to form a map of
the globe. The ceiling represents the north polar regions, England is in the
gallery, the tropics in the upper circle, Australia on the dress circle and
the antarctic in the pit. A myriad of computers [human] are at work upon the
weather of the part of the map where each sits, but each computer attends to
only one equation or part of equation... Numerous little 'night signs' display
the instantaneous values so that neighboring computers can read them. Each
number is thus displayed in three adjacent zones so as to maintain communi-
cation to the North and South on the map. From the floor of the pit a tall
pillar rises to half the height of the hall. It carries a large pulpit on
its top. In this sits the man in charge of the whole theater... One of his
duties is to maintain a uniform speed of progress in all parts of the globe.
In this respect he is like the conductor of an orchestra in which the instru-
ments are slide-rules and calculating machines. But instead of waving a baton
he turns a beam of rosy light upon those who are behindhand."

* * * * * *

In his book The Mathematical Psychology of War, Richardson tried to apply
mathematical concepts and techniques to the examination of human conflict.

* * * * * *

Richardson was a Quaker and conscientious objector. His wife recalled,
"There came a time of heartbreak when those most interested in his 'upper air'
researches proved to be the 'poison gas' experts. Lewis stopped his
meteorology researches, destroying such as had not been published. What this
cost him none will ever know!"

How does complexity arise? This book uses "life" -- the video aquarium-like
computer program based on mathematician Conway's graph-paper "game" -- as a
metaphor for the question. A lot of good ideas are stirred up.

A great work that explores consciousness, recursion and aesthetics with a witty
and serendipitous blend of the mathematics of Godel, the graphic art of Escher,
and the music of Bach, borrowing from the style of Lewis Carroll.

Hofstadter was invited to take over Martin Gardner's Mathematical Games column
in Scientific American, and he re-arranged the letters to spell Metamagical
Themas. This book is a collection of those columns, which continue some of the
issues of Godel, Escher, Bach. I especially recommend sections I and III.

Okay, a good part of what I do in my job is program computers, and this book
really helped me get straight early on about how to use computers well.

QUOTE:

Most users of a tool are willing to meet you halfway; if you do ninety per cent
of the job, they will ecstatic.

* * * * * *

What sorts of tools? Computing is a broad field, and we can't begin to cover
every kind of application. Instead we have concentrated on an activity which
is central to programming -- tools that help us develop other programs. They
are programs that we use regularly, most of them every day; we used essentially
all of them while we were writing this book.

* * * * * *

How should we test [a program to count the lines in a file] to make sure it
really works? When bugs occur, they usually arise at the "boundaries" or
extremes of program operation. These are the "exceptions that prove the rule."
Here the boundaries are fairly simple: a file with no lines and a file with one
line. If the code handles these cases correctly, and and the general case of a
file with more than one line, it is probable that it will handle all inputs
correctly.

If you program, and you're not using the C language and the UNIX operating
system, you're probably working too hard. C is the only langauge designed by a
programmer for programmers to code in. (When FORTRAN was designed there were
no programmers; it was for engineers. PASCAL was to teach programming. BASIC
was used to teach graduate students how to implement an interpreter, etc...)
Most operating systems are written by hardware vendors to run only on their
systems, are incompatible with anything else, and are rushed out the door
before they are ready to help sell a specific piece of equipment. UNIX and C
were developed by programmers at Bell Labs over a period of twelve years,
during which the Federal government would not let the phone company sell
software. The honed the language and the system into a marvelously powerful
toolkit. This book is an excellent guide to using these toolkits together.

QUOTE:

As the UNIX system has spread, the fraction of its users who are skilled in its
application has decreased.

* * * * * *

Often the manual is kept on-line so that you can read it on your terminal. If
you get stuck on something, and can't find expert help, you can print any
manual page on your terminal with the command man command-name. Thus to read
about the who command type:

$ man who

and, of course,

$ man man

tells about the man command.

* * * * * *

yacc stands for "yet another compiler compiler," a comment by its creator,
Steve Johnson, on the number of such programs extant at the time it was being
developed (around 1972). yacc is one of a handful that have flourished.

RIGOR: ****_ INTUITION: ***__

TELEVISION

"My children had lived several lifetimes
compared to their grandparents
when they began grade one."
-- an IBM executive
quoted by Marshall McLuhan
Understanding MediaConnections Burke, James

IDEAS:

social history of technology

NOTES:

In the vein of Lynn White, this witty and very likable Englishman proceeds to
bop through history finding some of the most remarkable connections within the
history of technology and its relationship to society. The show aired first
around the same time as Carl Sagan's much-hailed Cosmos. Sagan put me to
sleep; Burke woke me up.

RIGOR: **___ INTUITION: ****_

Planet Earth

IDEAS:

hydrosphere

NOTES:

Geology, meteorology, ecology and biology are blended nicely in this PBS
series, which has a lot of nice sequences of turbulence in the hydrosphere.

RIGOR: **___ INTUITION: ***__

PERIODICALS

Stewart Brand gave up publishing Whole Earth Catalogs in 1970 because they were
losing money. He bowed out with the monster Last Whole Earth Catalog.
Surprise, it made it to the New York Times best seller list and Brand made it
to the talk show circuit. How did he follow and act like that? After drifitng
for four years, he came out with the Whole Earth Epilog and began publishing
The CoEvolution Quarterly. Later the name was changed to the higher-profile
Whole Earth Review. Some of the great new ideas of the last two decades
appeared early on in this eclectic journal of "access to tools."

QUOTE:

"COEVOLUTION" -- The term was coined in 1965 by Paul Ehrlich and Peter Raven in
their study of the predator-prey relationship of caterpillars and plants. They
found that the eaters and the eaten evolved in close response to each other --
coevolution. (Some plants developed defensive alkaloid poisons. Some
caterpillars developed a taste for alkaloids. The plants diversified wildly.
The caterpillars diversified with them. What really evolved was the
relationship, stably dynamic, unpredicatble and sure.)

It seems that all evolution is coevolution. The beauty of the term is what it
adds to the concepts of ecology. Language such as "preserving the ecology"
suggests something quite perfect -- static, knowable, oriented backward,
unwelcoming to human foolishness... unreal. Ecology is whole system alright,
but coevolution is whole system in TIME. The health of it is forward --
systemic self-education which feeds on constant imperfection. We coevolving
watchers and meddlers are not left out of it.

Ecology maintains.
Coevolution learns.

[-- Stewart Brand, Summer 1975]

Theory of Game-Change

YOU CAN'T CHANGE A GAME BY WINNING IT, goes the formula, OR LOSING IT OR
REFEREEING IT OR SPECTATING IT. YOU CHANGE A GAME BY LEAVING IT, GOING
SOMEWHERE ELSE, AND STARTING A NEW GAME. IF IT WORKS, IT WILL IN TIME ALTER OR
REPLACE THE OLD GAME.

I read "50 and 100 Years Ago," "Science and the Citizen," "Science and
Business," and "Computer Recreations" every month.

IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications

NOTES:

The great new tool in systems theory for the nineties is the graphics
supercomputer, running visualization software, and the trickle-down from
this vanguard to the Personal Computer, and so it pays to keep an eye on the
graphics frontier. This magazine is the most rigorous and the most leading
edge in the CG field.

SOFTWARE

I asked Craig Upson, who did visualization research for Stardent Computer, what
the best way was to learn differential equations. He said play with
Mathematica. Apparently you can, for example, construct the chaotic system of
differential equations which generate the Lorenz attractor, and then watch as
the attractor is traced out. The program runs on the Macintosh as well as
Stardent's graphics supercomputers. The chief architect of Mathematica, Steve
Wolfram, is also a pioneer of cellular automata and complexity theory.

Bill Atkinson wrote MacPaint for the first Apple Macintosh computer, and as a
believer in the "hacker ethic" (see Hackers, above) wanted it given away to all
Mac users. This policy was reversed behinf Bill's back about the time he came
up with a grand vision for an open software package to do hypertext on the Mac.

He went to John Scully and the executive staff of Apple and said: "What I want
is to bundle [HyperCard]. If you want to bundle it, I'll write it for Apple.
You can have the exclusive proprietary rights and all that stuff, but if you
don't want to bundle it then it's time for me to graduate from Apple and become
an independent developer myself. I'm going to get this out to the people
whether I give it away or whether I get Apple to give it away." So Apple
accepted his terms, and hypercard has become the de-facto standard in hypertext
software. Because of its open design, there is no way to "lock" a hypercard
program (called a "stack") so that others can't see it; there is no such thing
as "source code" which is unavailable at run time. A powerful mind tool from a
brilliant visionary.

Perhaps it is a bit unfair for me to list here software which now runs only on
a $100,000 Graphics Supercomputer, but this software is so useful and amazing.
AVS allows the easy interactive visualization of static or changing scientific
data, from measurements or simulations, using a visual programming interface
(with a mouse and menus) to achieve a visualization workbench, where "what-if"
experiments in data representation can be immediately performed. It makes very
good use of the human-machine graphical interface to accomplish visualization.

AVS is currently available from AVS, Inc.

RIGOR: ****_ INTUITION: ****_

ACTION

Write Your Own Software

IDEAS:

simulation, debugging

NOTES:

Many of the mathematical models described in the above works can be easily and
enjoyably simulated on a Personal Computer. I'm surprised more of this has not
been done. Consider that Commodore 64 computer, usually thought of as "a toy,"
can be bought for a song at a swap meet in 1990, and yet has more compute
capability than Whirlwind or Eniac or any of the first eletronic digital
computers. It is easy, given a complete spec, to program a modern PC to
emulate an early digital computer, an analog device, or any rigorous model of a
system. I myself have written two such simulations: one of Ross Ashby's
homeostat (see Design for a Brain, above) using text output to dislay results
on a Data General minicomputer, and the other of of a general Markov machine
(see An Introduction to Cybernetics, also by Ashby) which displayed its
changing states graphically on an Apple II+ microcomputer. This type of
programming project is very educational for the programmer, and has additional
educational value to those who play with the finished programs.

RIGOR: ***** INTUITION: ****_

Fantasy, War and Simulation Games

IDEAS:

suspension of disbelief

NOTES:

Play Monopoly, Diplomacy, Risk, Dungeons and Dragons, and/or The Battle of
Shiloh, all available in box form. Find a group perpuating the underground
political-economic-military game, "Empire." Get some of those pop-sociology
simulation games that first appeared in the late sixties. Play physical
strategy games, like Capture the Flag, Laser Tag and Paint-Gun War. Design
your own games and play them. All the really important work gets done during
play.

RIGOR: ****_ INTUITION: ***__

Field Work

IDEAS:

scientific method

NOTES:

Find a system and study it. Use the disciplines of one or more of the natural
sciences. Check the literature. Take good notes. Form testable conclusions,
and test them. Publish your results somehow.

RIGOR: ***__ INTUITION: ****_

Solving Real Problems

IDEAS:

responsibility, results

NOTES:

In Utopia or Oblivion, Bucky Fuller said: "My experience teaches me that all
philosophic concepts which are translated only into 'bright ideas' as voiced or
written suggestions or criticisms are abortions of intellect's higher
potentials. My experience teaches me that philosophic conclusions which are
always teleologically derived may always be reduced to design-science changes
in the environment which can permit other individuals spontaneous realization
of higher destiny, i.e., behaving unconsciously in more effective manner. For
instance, a turn in a highway may be banked angularly..."

In my course at UCSC in Understanding Whole Systems the final paper was to be
on a real problem that the student had solved. Some were frightened of the
world beyond the ivory tower and copped out; others made a real difference. I
have always found making a real difference to be the most educational and
empowering thing I can do.

RIGOR: ***** INTUITION: *****

FEEDBACK REQUESTED

You can help me solve a real problem. This is my first
distribution of this document, and I want to know if it helps
anyone. Comments to: